BEIJING – Five months after violence broke out in the northwestern Chinese province of Xinjiang, the area still remains under tight control. International calls are barred to and from Xinjiang. There is no Internet access available to the general population. And the government is in the midst of waging a "Strike Hard" campaign.

Earlier this month, nine people were executed for taking part in the July 5 riots, which official reports say killed 197 people. It was the worst single outbreak of violence in China in decades.

The violence erupted after ethnic minority Uighurs marched on Urumqi, the provincial capital, to protest the killing of two Uighur workers in southern China by Han Chinese. The Uighurs are a Turkic-speaking people that make up the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang, where large numbers of Han Chinese have been migrating to over recent decades.

Writer Matthew Teague was on assignment for National Geographic magazine in Xinjiang, to "bring some information about the [Uighur] people to the reader" and arrived in China just after the unrest began. His article – along with photographs by Carolyn Drake – is in the December issue of the magazine. He described his experience to NBC News in the video link above.